Deeplinks Blog posts about Digital Books

Concerns about Google Book Search and its potential effects on reader privacy are spreading widely in the wake of the joint action alert issued by EFF and the ACLU of Northern California.

Copyright scholar Pam Samuelson recently investigated the scope of the settlement in an editorial titled "The Audacity of the Google Book Search Settlement," noting that "...Google has negotiated a settlement agreement designed to give it a compulsory license to all books in copyright throughout the world forever."

NPR had a radio story yesterday on the Google Books settlement and the privacy concerns raised by EFF and many authors and publishers. It's short but does a great job of covering the basic points, and includes excellent commentary from author Jonathan Lethem, who has joined EFF in calling on Google to do more to commit to privacy protections for readers:

Novelist Jonathan Lethem says Google should be "congratulated" for its effort. Lethem adds, "This is the moment to take a look and say, 'Why isn't it as private as the world we're being asked to leave behind, the world of physical books?' "

Not surprisingly, Amazon’s recent deletion of George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm from its customers' Kindle e-book readers has sparked a class action lawsuit by Kindle users. After all, not only was the remote deletion “stupid,” as CEO Jim Bezos admitted, it also appears to have been a violation of the terms of service for Kindle that Amazon itself drafted.

Farhad Manjoo over at Slate has written the best summation to date on Amazon's 1984 scandal, in which digital versions of the Orwell classic were surreptitiously removed from users' Kindles without their permission.

Amazon has apologized and promised never to delete books in this fashion in the future. But Manjoo points out that the real lesson here is that the power to delete digital books remotely exists in the first place: